4. It is true, then, speaking of the people of Scotland generally, that we rest our Sabbath observance on Divine appointment, and that we cling tenaciously to a whole Sabbath. This is our crown, which I trust no one will ever take from us, and which, indeed, can only be lost in a community of free men, by being voluntarily and guiltily abdicated. But in what I have hitherto said, I have spoken more of our Scottish principles than of our Scottish practice; and when I come to speak of this, _I find myself constrained to protest against two opposite representations that have been given of our Sabbath-keeping_, the one in the form of injurious caricature, and the other in a style of over-colouring that very greatly exceeds the sober reality. Of all the bold pictures in which certain of our modern novelists have indulged, there is none in which they have allowed their imaginations a more wild and unwarranted licence, than in the pictures with which they have entertained their readers of a Sabbath in a Scottish family. These pictures have been creations rather than caricatures. And there have been travellers who have become writers of fiction when they have touched on this subject, and who have quite equalled the novel-writers in the liberties they have taken with the simple truth. One writer, presuming, we suppose, on the safe distance of his readers from the scene which he describes, gravely informs them that in the city of Edinburgh all the window-blinds are kept carefully closed during the whole of the Sabbath, as if to attemper the gloom of the house to the gloomy state of mind of its inmates, and describes the little children as cowering under a vague sense of awe, and dreading to indulge even an innocent smile. Men who write thus may safely be affirmed never to have spent a single Sabbath-day in a religious family in Scotland. That the Sabbath is in no instance presented in a repulsive form before the young, by their rather being told what they are not to do, than of the blessed work to which the Sabbath summons them, it would be too much to affirm; for what institution of heaven does not occasionally suffer from human handling? But our danger, even in Scotland, in these days, does not arise from over-restraint or scrupulosity; and we speak from long and happy experience, when we assert that our Sabbath-keeping in Scotland is usually marked by a calm cheerfulness without frivolity, and that on that day, above all others, streams of gladness flow through myriads of hearts which have their secret and their fountain-head not in the exclusion of religion, but in the more complete turning of the mind to religious thoughts and associations. "Then wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet, retired solitude, Where, with her best nurse, Contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets go her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired."